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Over the course of the Yosemite beta, we’ve had a few reports of users not being able to make Witch work properly. If you’ve got this problem, you’ll know, because you’ll see this dialog every time you try to call up the Witch switcher panel:

For the sake of search engines, the text reads:

“witchdaemon” would like to control this computer using accessibility features

Grant access to this application in Security & Privacy preferences, located in System Preferences.

You’ll see that even after you think you’ve done what it asks you to do, and then you’ll get frustrated and upset and angry and blame us and send me nasty emails. And I completely feel your pain. And I wish I could tell you that it’s a bug in our code that’s causing the problem, so that we could fix it. But it’s not.

Instead, it’s an issue with Yosemite and how it handles (or rather, doesn’t handle) granting Accessibility access to helper apps that are included within another app’s bundle. So as much as I’d love to tell you we’re working on a fix, this isn’t something we can fix. (We may be able to work around the OS X issue, which is what we’re trying to do now. But that’s not fixing the problem, it’s avoiding the problem.)

The good news is that you can get Witch functioning again, even before Apple fixes the issue (or we manage to work around it). Here’s how…

One of Butler‘s features is a Bookmarks menu that displays bookmarks from a number of browsers, including classics such as Internet Explorer (thereby revealing the depths of Butler’s life experiences).

You can access these bookmarks from the Butler icon in your menu bar, or create a keyboard shortcut to pop it up as a menu near the mouse, put it in a droplet, etc. In short, it’s a quick way to get at your bookmarks without first going to your browser.

Over the years, however, most of these shortcuts have stopped working, as the various browsers changed the manner in which they store their bookmarks. As of today, in fact, only Safari and Camino still appear to work properly. (We’ll see what we can do about updating support for the other browsers in Butler 5, though we’ll probably not bother to look at Internet Explorer.)

Thanks to Butler user Rick, however, we can add one more browser back to that list: Firefox. He discovered a simple way to get Firefox’s bookmarks working again in Butler. (My workaround has been to use Xmarks to sync bookmarks across all my browsers, and then just use the Safari entry in Butler to see them.) Read on for Rick’s solution…

Here’s how to get your Firefox bookmarks back into Butler’s Bookmarks menu:

In Firefox, type about:config in the URL bar, then press Return. You’ll see a warning about voiding the warranty; click on the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.

In the Filter box, type autoexport, and the list of matches will be reduced to just one: browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML.

Double-click anywhere on the browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML line, and you should see its Value entry change to true.

Quit and restart Firefox.

That’s it; in a few minutes, you should find that the Firefox entry in Butler’s Bookmarks item is now populated with your Firefox bookmarks. Thanks again to Rick for pointing out this workaround.

Good news, users of BBEdit, TextMate, TextWrangler, and other apps that use drawers in their user interface: Moom 2.2 includes optional drawer support. Enable drawer support on the General tab of Moom’s settings window, and Moom will account for the presence of a drawer before moving/zooming the associated window.

Moom 2.2 has a number of other minor changes and improvements, all of which are nicely documented on its release notes page. If you bought directly from us, use in-app updating to get the new version (or just download the full version from our site). If you bought from the App Store, Moom 2.2 should show as an available update very shortly, if it’s not there already.

Today we released Usher 1.1.3, a minor update that addresses a few issues (release notes). The release of 1.1.3 comes just days after Usher’s six month anniversary (it was released on October 14, 2010). As such, we’ve decided to celebrate this milestone by putting Usher on sale for a week—and on sale in a big way:

Usher will cost only $17.99 until Tuesday, April 26th, 2011.

We think Usher is an amazing tool, and at 50% off, now’s the time to bring order to your collection of movies and videos. You can purchase Usher directly from us, or via the App Store; the choice is yours, as it should be.

In the interest of expanding the available support options for our users, we’ve created discussion groups (which can be read online, or subscribed to via email or RSS) for all of our products. The main advantage of the discussion groups is that users can speak with other users, which isn’t possible via our existing email or trouble ticket support systems.

We’ve set the groups up via Google Groups, mainly because they’ve got a really good group management system. If you have a Google account, you can sign up for each group via the web, and set your preferences (email delivery, etc.) as you wish. If you don’t have a Google account, you can only sign up via email, and you can’t set any preferences. (This page explains what you can and can’t do in Google Groups if you don’t have a Google account.)